There currently exist methods for isolating applications within isolation environments and according to an application profile, a user session or another parameter that can be used to isolate applications. When an application executes within an isolation environment, typically that application cannot communicate with other applications not executing within the isolation environment. Permitting an isolated application to communicate with an application outside of the isolation environment may require an administrator to package the isolated application and the other application into a larger single isolation image or profile.
Creating an isolation environment requires creating an image of disk data, communicating that image to a kernel mode component and to user mode components. This process can take a great deal of time and require many resources. In particular, creating an image of disk data requires parsing data structures on a disk, a process that becomes increasingly more resource intensive as the number of profiles executing on a disk increases. Thus, creating a larger single isolation image or profile each time an application wishes to communicate with another application that does not reside in the application's isolation environment, can be time and resource intensive. Methods and systems are therefore needed that permit applications executing in different isolation environments to talk with one another without requiring the creation of a separate isolation image or profile.